Caitlin Doughty on Talking to Your Children about Death

Caitlin Doughty, of "Ask a Mortician" fame, has some wonderful advice for talking to children about death and trauma. It's so good, in fact, that I think it's also quite sound advice for speaking to adults about death and trauma. Advice tidbit #1: be honest. Advice tidbit #2: hug them whether they like it or not. (okay maybe not so appropriate for adults or children to whom you are not a parent or guardian.)

After the breathtakingly quick succession of senseless acts of violence across the world over the past week, it's nice to hear someone who works with death daily tell you to "turn off the death porn" and discuss your feelings with a loved one.

Click through to her original post from yesterday for links to even more sound advice -- both hers and Mr. Rogers'.

Getting Weird with David Bowie

And nostalgic, and maybe even a little bit weepy, too. Remember sitting on the floor of your bedroom and listening to "Life on Mars?" while cutting and pasting bits and pieces of things together for your 'zine? And it was a track on the b side of a mix tape? Cassette tape? And you knew you'd only damage the tape if you were to rewind and listen again and rewind and listen again, so you would flip the tape, listen to a Smiths song, and then flip it back again? And you were fifteen years old? Of course you do!

I woke up listening to David Bowie's "Life on Mars?" for the first time in a very long time Sunday morning. My dad had put it on in the living room while preparing breakfast. He's a Jet Propulsion Laboratory-Caltech employee and member of the Mars Science Lab team; Sunday was, of course, the day of the rover's landing on Mars, and Jason, Roscoe, and I had driven down to LA the day before to be there with the rest of the family for the big event. Gushing about my dad's super important and awesome role in the team would compromise the certain level of anonymity I like to maintain on this here blog, so suffice it to say I'm incredibly proud of my dad and his team's accomplishments. Here's a little Bowie for them; their rover, Curiosity (aka Johnny 5); and the decades of technological and scientific advancements their mission will (continue to) give us. Bowie salutes you as you take us five million steps closer to answering his question!

Prolonging the Spooky with Andy Warhol

I woke up to a wonderfully dark, spooky, and overcast morning up here in the Santa Cruz mountains, and now that we're approaching noon, it's all burning off and giving way to a sunny day. In order to prolong the spooky, I leave here for you an incredibly unnerving 4 minute and 28 second video of Andy Warhol eating a hamburger. 

If you read the video description on YouTube, you'll learn that this scene was filmed for a Danish art movie, that Warhol preferred McDonalds, and that this video comprises "a classic ASMR trigger scene", which I did look up* but can't say that I experienced. The only thing triggered for me was major Andy Warhol discomfort. You're welcome!


Note: Warhol never actually finishes the burger, he leaves the last bite in the wrapper (!!!).

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* Man, oh man, oh man, oh man, have I stumbled down the internet rabbit hole into a whole new world of strange.

A Little (Nano) Science Fiction for Your Sunday Evening

For your viewing pleasure, here is the first episode of the Nano SciFi Tales series by director Nacho Vigalondo (Timecrimes [2003] and the very recently released Extraterrestrial [2012]). Each Nano SciFi video is under 21 seconds and totally and completely charming. 

I can watch this one video, in particular, over, and over, and over. And laugh out loud as it ends, every single time. Enjoy!

Catch the rest of the nano videos at the WOPP YouTube channel, here.

Typical Espanish: Gazpachooo

Thank you, thank you, thank you, Claudia, for sending me this fabulous video Sunday. I've listened to it over and over and over. You've ensured that this innocent gazpacho kick explode into a full-blown gazpacho obsession. It's all I can think about, and now, it's all I hear. I sing the song's refrain in my dreams. Jason is living a nightmare.

La Ogra presents her summer hit: "Gazpacho".* It's a year old, but it's new to me, and it's become my summer anthem. Here's to the summer of gazpacho!

As soon as I've finished this first batch (I'm so close), I'm going to make a new, decidedly smaller, batch using some of that fancy Cuban Basil I got on St. John's Eve. Magical, basil gazpacho? Yes, yes, a thousand times yes!!!

* Did I buy the single on iTunes? You bet I did.